Abstract
This article examines defining features of East German urban planning—primarily the housing complex and the city/settlement binary—and their relationship to Eisenhüttenstadt, a city founded in 1950 as Stalinstadt, an East German socialist utopia. Today Eisenhüttenstadt is home to a novel form of urban renewal in which architects and planners look to the socialist past for inspiration as they imagine a new urban future. I examine the history of socialist urbanism as it was implemented in Eisenhüttenstadt, as well as how residents and urban planners came to understand socialist urbanism in the years immediately following German reunification. I then examine an urban renewal program, started in 2014, that explicitly draws on the socialist past. In doing so, I aim to consider the socialist city not as an architectural form but as a set of practices, spatial imaginations, and ethical commitments that can be reanimated even in a capitalist sociopolitical context.
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